IGOR WEBB
Yvor W inters as Teacher
Even at the time that Yvor Winters was best known, he occupied an eccen–
tric position both among poets and literary critics. His severe tastes and
beliefs, and his inclination to quarrel, relegated him to an embatded, isolat–
ed citadel. But here he was master, exerting profound influence over
generations of students. Those of his students who took to writing poetry
or criticism for a time formed a loose, devoted, talented, if minor, school
wi thin the wider li terary world.
I am going to write about Yvor Winters as a teacher. And I should
make it clear that by the time I got to enroll in his classes in the early 1960s,
Winters had been at Stanford for a very long time and was nearing the end
both of his career and his life. There was current a nasty undergraduate quip
about Winters, with his ponderous walk and dour appearance, to the effect
that he had waited all of his life to arrive at last at his late sixties and be able
to speak authentically of the shadow of death. Few students, I think, were
aware of his serious illness as a young man. Anyway, in those days, when
everyone over thirty was an enemy, to be over sixty was an unimaginable
misfortune. As it happened, Winters died not long afterwards.
Winters' physical movements, his manner of speaking, indeed every–
thing about him had the studied, pugnacious methodicity of his essays. Of
a solid and portly build, wi th a large head and large bumps above the eyes–
a sign, he liked to claim, of exceptional powers of observation-Winters
lumbered down the overbright Stanford walks like a literary Darth Vader.
He usually walked alone. You had the feeling that
if
you were to dare
approach him, you had better have something weighty and thoroughly
worked out to say. And whatever that was had better be right. A medieval
sadness enveloped him, ominous and dark.
As a teacher, Winters did everything wrong. By today's elaborate stan–
dards of care, clarity, and prophylactic completeness, the mimeographed
"syllabus" Winters provided to his cowed classes was a scandal. The poor
innocent who had signed up unaware-like me-was likely to be panic–
stricken by the absence of any hint ofjust what you were supposed to study.
Oh yes, there was a list of readings. But-for example in his famous class
on "The Lyric"-this list amounted to no more than the names of poets
he expected you to read. Since there were no poems singled out for partic–
ular notice and no books ordered at the bookstore or on reserve in the
